


No King of England

by redletters



Category: Slings & Arrows
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-18
Updated: 2006-12-18
Packaged: 2018-01-25 04:51:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1632482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redletters/pseuds/redletters
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How did Geoffrey end up duelling with Darren Nichols "on the quad at midnight" at university? Grad school thesis projects are a sticky wicket.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No King of England

**Author's Note:**

> Note after the Open Doors Yuletide import in 2014: This is a very old fic that I'm too embarrassed to reread. If you're reading it, best of luck and I hope it isn't too terrible!
> 
> Written for Thea.

 

 

Geoffrey rolled over and discovered he had vomited in his boot. Not his boot; a costume boot. He throws it at Gadshill's head in an Eastcheap melee.

Character, he thought. I can use this.

He had yet to recall that last night the show had closed, and this morning, with barely a blink for breath, rehearsals for the dread sequel would begin.

"The difference between Kenneth Branagh and myself," Geoffrey said to the curtains, "is that I am dashing and good-looking and do not have to rely on Derek Jacobi and mud for characterization." He picked up the boot and walked it to the kitchen sink, telling the drain, "And I have dark hair."

Henry V, at Canada's largest university. He recalled an English exchange student referring to Canada as "the Wales of America". Perhaps Darren would cast a Newfie as Fluellen?

The fantastic thing about vomiting was that it meant practically no hangover. Geoffrey upended the boot in the sink, turned on the tap, and began to whistle.

He was still wearing his costume shirt, as well, sleep-sweaty. Sarah would have to wash it before tonight--"Shit!" Geoffrey said, dropping the boot in the sink and peeling off the sticky clothing, nearly tripping over a doublet on the floor as he flew into the bedroom.

The faucet continued to run.

**  
The outside door to the rehearsal room was ajar. Geoffrey wore a sweater to cover up the wrinkled top he'd snatched off the floor barely five minutes ago, and he was already flushed from running from his on-campus flat to the theatre building. Whose fucking idea had it been to schedule the first table meeting the day after closing? Not the faculty advisor's, certainly--he pushed open the door gently--

"...and it is my hope that this early morning will throw you immediately into your characters, without time for thought or deliberation, from which we can extract some semblance of a message."

The director's, of course. Darren Nichols greeted Geoffrey's arrival as he always did, with an arched brow and a quickly hidden gleam in his eye.

"Ah, Harry," he said. "How kind of you to join we subjects here below."

"Herein will I imitate the sun," Geoffrey said, flashing a quick grin at Mark, his Poins, now his Scrope.

Darren rolled back his shoulders and settled further in his chair. "Yes, thank you," he said, as though searching for a cleverer outlet for his sarcasm but unable to find it. "Now. Henry the Fifth."

Geoffrey took his place and flipped open the script on the long plastic table. His exasperation, or amusement, must have shown, because Mark leaned over and whispered, "Give the guy a little slack. It's his thesis project, too."

"I gave him slack when he chose 'Edward II' for our senior collaboration as undergrads," Geoffrey whispered back. "Have I reminded you of that little incident? Because I can again: Despenser was naked -- actually naked, Mark, not just stage naked, with a little sling and a long shirt -- and King Edward was killed by an enormous red-hot cock."

Mark choked on his water. Poor first-year Dennis, whose advisor had roped or bribed him into stage managing, looked over, worried.

"Henry the Fifth," Darren said, more loudly. "First order of business. Cuts, cuts, cuts."

Across from Geoffrey, Bryan's face fell -- with Darren, the Chorus would probably be gutted.

"This is a play about war, about death, about moroseness and ultimately loss of hope. We will represent this by eliminating all the extraneous poetry -- King Henry's big speeches can all go -- and replacing it with a forty-minute rendering of the slaughter of the English boys, counterpointed with the murder of the French prisoners."

The company's posture drooped as one.

"It's not hard," Cady said, low in his ear. "Henry the Fifth! The Tudor myth incarnate! All you need is some hack, hack, slash slash, Welsh people are funny, let's kick some French ass and go home."

"Actually," Geoffrey said, one eye on Darren, who was beginning to discuss the prisoners' costumes in detail, "for once I think he's got it more or less on the money."

Cady stared at him.

"I mean," he said. He could feel the word-avalanche building behind him. Why did he always have to tell people exactly what he thought of art? He was going to end up one of those musty old men that public television hauls out every year or so to talk about The Shakespeare Phenomenon, and no one would invite him to parties. "Not this ridiculous business with the boys, of course -- that's just Darren's natural pederasty rearing its head, so to speak -- but Henry Five is fundamentally a play about this monarch's inability to justify his instigation of a bloody dirty conflict, and his own use of the worst tactics in it, to himself and to his subjects. Who are mostly stand-ins for his own conscience."

He could never remember to keep his voice down when he did it, either. Darren had fallen silent; Geoffrey suspected he was stuck between his need to assert his director's authority and the shock of learning that for once, he and Geoffrey agreed on a play's interpretation. Geoffrey seized the space and plunged ahead.

"And he's got this spectre of regicide hanging over his head, his reign is like this nine-year break in the Wars of the Roses. His father got the crown by playing dirty cricket, so the whole thing's steeped in--in whiffiness from the start. Henry's not this golden boy of Monmouth like the Tudors try to make him out to be, he's not a reincarnation of Edward the Black Prince, the strong arm of English victory. He doesn't know if he's doing the right thing, sometimes he doesn't think he is doing the right thing. Sometimes he does think he's doing the right thing, but everyone else disagrees. He doesn't even know if he should be king, speaking of rights. That's why the business with the traitors hits so hard at the beginning. At the end of the day, Henry's just trying to keep as many of his men alive as possible, except that he fails twice -- he doesn't guard the boys' camp properly, and he doesn't give the French the same consideration, when they're prisoners. The boys and the prisoners, that's key. And the hanging of Bardolph, which I hope to God you're keeping in, Darren, even though Bardolph is a heterosexual drunkard." Geoffrey paused. "Oh, and the argument with Williams, definitely. And the speech at Harfleur. And kind of the last scene with the King of France, where he calls Kate a 'demand' and then woos her."

Cady smiled at him for the last bit. Mark coughed.

"What?" Geoffrey said to him. "There's no way we're ditching the traitors, come on."

Darren slammed shut his script and stood up. "Au contraire," he began: directorial assertiveness had won.

"Five minutes, everybody," Dennis said brightly.

**

Darren called it a day at half-eleven. Geoffrey took the walk from rehearsal room to on-campus flat more slowly this time, sagging into the railing of the cement steps down from the theatre.

Was it possible to put in a good performance with a director like that? With the script shredded and spit-stuck together and a pile of groaning French prisoners in shackles and leather to contend with?

"The text," his undergrad coach said. "Shakespeare is the text. Nail the text, nail the play; everything else is just parsley." He'd never thought to ask what would happen when it wasn't his call to make.

Geoffrey unlocked his flat and heard the carpet squelch as he pushed the front door into the dining room. "Hah!" He splashed through the inch-deep water on the floor, turned off the faucet, recovered the boot, hung it by its laces to dry in the window, and blinked at the green light on the answering machine.

**

"I didn't know you could get fired from your senior thesis," Mark said at the bar that night.

"Half quit, I suppose," Geoffrey said. "I just love that he didn't have the guts to tell me to my face, though. Or my ear. I think that shows improvement, actually. He's growing a sense of shame."

**

He made an appointment with his advisor the next day.

"The requirement is a major role in a university production," Dr. Greer said. Plays were strewn half-open on her desk: all small-cast or one-person shows. Geoffrey felt a twinge of guilt.

"I'm sure I can put something together, given a venue," he said, reaching over and closing one of the books.

"It would be immensely easier to make up with Darren, I think," she said. "Your interest is Shakespeare, obviously. It's rare for an actor to get an opportunity like this, you know -- you've already played Hal for two semesters."

"I think most of the students here have been playing Hal for a lot longer than that," Geoffrey said, but quickly, "Do you think it's worthwhile?"

Dr. Greer exhaled. "Good plays will out," she said. "You just have to push for them sometimes. I would very much like to see your Henry, Geoffrey."

Geoffrey sat back in his chair.

"You know, I played the Chorus when I was in grad school," Dr. Greer said, smiling.

"Thesis project?" he asked.

"Lost a bet," she said.

**

"Is good, or great, or even good, theatre self-justifying?" Geoffrey wrote in his thesis journal that night. "And does any kind of theatre justify Darren Nichols?"

**

He and Cady were doing Orsino and Viola in studio, which gave her a chance to ask him what the hell he thought he was doing. They sat on black-painted boxes. Blue-light tape stuck to the soles of their shoes while Bryan plucked a tune as Feste.

"If ever thou shouldst love, in the sweet--what?"

"I said, Darren hasn't got a replacement, just Dennis reading the lines from offstage."

"Is he...looking for one?"

Cady tilted her head. "Theories diverge. He is either taking advantage of your little spat to explore the pit of nihilistic emptiness he's always suspected to be at the center of the play--"

"Oh, for God's sake," Geoffrey said.

"--or he's putting off recasting because he still secretly hopes you'll return to our few, our happy few."

"Stop that," Geoffrey said. "That's an appeal to my aesthetics. And it's not going to work, because Darren's idea of theatre makes my aesthetics want to rip their own faces off whenever it comes up."

Cady shrugged.

"Besides," Geoffrey said with finality, "he cut that speech." Before them, Bryan stopped playing.

"It gives a very echo to the seat where Love is throned," Cady said, and Geoffrey continued:

"Thou dost speak masterly. My life upon't, young though thou art, thine eye  
Hath stay'd upon some favour that it loves...."

**

She persuaded him to start meeting with the cast at her house, after dark.

"Just to read through!" she said. "So we can get an idea of something real to act against, not just Dennis trying to read prose in pentameter."

"And so I can start speaking the text again and you'll seduce me back that way, right?" Geoffrey declined her proffered cigarette and drank his beer deep. "What the hell," he said, "if Darren finds out it'll drive him nuts."

**

He knocked on Cady's door at half seven and, when it opened, immediately knew he'd made the right decision.

"What ho, my boy!" Bryan thundered, his voice slipping down into its Falstaff register. He clapped Geoffrey on the back and handed him a bottle of apple wine. "Close enough to sack for our purposes, I think," he said. Geoffrey threw back his head and laughed.

"Anon, anon!" he said, and Mark shouted recognition from the kitchen down the hall.

"Francis!"

"Anon, anon!" Geoffrey called back, louder.

The sitting-room was peppered with people: Cady beamed up at him beside Diana, a first-year playing Alice. Dennis practically tackled him with a script. "Can't...verse...no training...laughing...Darren offered...extra help...save me--"

Geoffrey didn't take the script. "Don't worry, you're not his type," he said. "Too tall. But whoever said you needed training to do verse? It's not even regular half the time, except in the first half-dozen plays. The Henry Sixes, Two Gents, Love's Labour's. And even then, once you've got ba-DUM, ba-DUM, ba-DUM, like a drum beat -- like a heartbeat -- that's all you need. Really, if you think about it too much, you'll force it, and that's worse. It helps you speak clearly and quickly, that's all--"

"Geoffrey." Mark was beside him with two tumblers, handing them to Geoffrey to hold while Mark popped off a bottlecap. "Honestly, just write a book!"

"Right," Geoffrey said, only now taking in Dennis' glazed and slightly panicked look. He looked at the glasses in his hands, twisted sideways and picked up the script under his elbow. "Sorry. You all just want to get on with the read-through."

"Well, and if you do ever write a book on Theatre and Art and Shake-speah, to read it out loud at the pub and make fun of you," Mark said, retrieving his tumblers and handing one to Dennis.

"O!" Bryan thundered from an ottoman. "For a muse of fire!"

Chatter dimmed quickly. Two or three darted in from the kitchen and took a sofa; everyone with a bottle or glass in their hand looked for a safe place to set it. Leafy pages rustled. Geoffrey saw every seat was occupied and sat cross-legged on the floor, in the doorway between the sitting-room and the kitchen.

"A kingdom for a stage," Bryan said, gesturing at Cady and the room, while a few laughed and thumped the floor. "Princes to act--"

"Way hey!" Diana said, lifting her glass.

"--and monarchs to behold the swelling scene!"

Geoffrey held his apple wine bottle and looked around; that one was trickier. Bryan went on. "Then should the warlike Harry, like himself -- like himself, Geoff, look lively--" Everyone laughed.

Bryan grew more serious. "Assume the port of Mars, and at his heels, leash'd in like hounds, should famine, sword, and fire crouch for employment."

A few minutes later, Geoffrey cleared his throat. He had been leaning over his script, in his lap, but now he straightened his back and felt his lungs spread, his actor's air fill them. "May I with right and conscience make this claim?"

Diana was the Boy as well as Alice; her French accent was best. Mark picked up Fluellen.

"But if the cause be not good," Geoffrey was told gravely. He hadn't been drinking, but he felt giddy and goosebumpy nonetheless. "The king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all 'We died at such a place!'"

"Every subject's duty is the king's; but every subject's soul is his own," he replied, but he could feel that King Harry didn't even believe himself there. And so he reached out, grasping for hope, groping blindly that God's terrible judgement would not fall on his soldiers as well as him: "Not today, O Lord! O, not today! Think not upon the fault my father made in compassing the crown! I Richard's body have interred anew, and on it have bestowed more contrite tears than ever from it issued forced drops of blood."

He saw Dennis mouth "forced", with the stress on the second syllable.

"More will I do," he said to God, to Dr. Greer, to the university and to Shakespeare, "though all that I can do is nothing worth."

"My liege," said Cady, her clear voice cutting through his thoughts.

"My cousin Gloucester's voice?" Geoffrey said. King Harry was glad of the distraction, but his business with God was still unfinished.

"O, that we now had here but one ten-thousand of those men in England that do no work today!" Mark sighed a few minutes later.

Geoffrey took a deep breath. "What's he that wishes so?" he said. "My cousin Westmoreland?" And he was off. Breathless, practically. His vocal coach would kill him for speaking like this: hastily, unprepared, immediate. But King Harry was as surprised to hear these words tumbling out of his mouth as anyone: just three hours before he had been quivering with self-doubt, and now he strove to overcome that by winning the only thing that counted in the eyes of God and the nation, honour.

"God's peace! I would not lose so great an honour as one man more, methinks, would share from me! For the best hope I have."

He stood, holding the script in his left hand, but he did not drop his eyes to it.

"This story shall the good man teach his son. And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by, from this day to the ending of the world, but we in it shall be remember'd. We few, we happy few! We band of brothers! For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother. Be he ne'er so vile, this day shall gentle his condition." His blood was singing in his ears. If anyone had spoken to him then, he would not have heard them. "And gentlemen in England now a-bed shall think themselves accursed they were not here -- and hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks that fought with us upon Saint Crispin's Day!"

Salisbury spoke next. Geoffrey looked at Bryan. Bryan looked at him. "I'm doing Henry Five with Darren Nichols this term, aren't I?" Geoffrey said.

Bryan handed him a bottle opener.

**

Darren only sniffed when Geoffrey sat down beside him in the pub that weekend, but they reached a truce after Geoffrey started slipping his whiskey into Darren's Diet Coke when Darren was in the bathroom. Darren even agreed to both of them approving the final script together, which was how Geoffrey ended up digging his old Stage Combat 203 foil out of his closet. At midnight he had an appointment to fight Darren over the Harfleur elocution. It was nearly eleven-thirty, and he realized too late that he had not had nearly enough to drink to justify this sort of thing.

"That's probably just theatre:" he wrote in his thesis journal the next day, "a whole series of events and ideas you should be more drunk for, but aren't."

He wrote it with a black eye and a bandaged arm, but with a full-text production on the books.

As Mark pointed out when helping him walk back to the flat, bodies are dispensable; Shakespeare never is.

 

 

 


End file.
